Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Because nobody ever predicts anything accurately, it's no surprise that Tomorrow's World never told us that all the great technological minds of the early 21st Century would choose the mobile phone as the medium through which to express their genius.*

The other day I downloaded Garry Kasparov's Chess game to my phone for a quid. A quid! A fiendishly complex chess-playing engine! On my phone! The download took about 30 seconds. 30 seconds! I felt like a transhuman.

Needless to say, I can't beat Garry at Expert level. Depressingly, I can't beat him at Advanced or Intermediate either. We're about evens at Novice. (I can trounce Beginner, but there's no real joy in it). I like chess - I have even read books about it and sometimes have chess dreams like the guy in that Nabakov novel - but I find I just don't have the right kind of brain to be in any sense a serious player. I can't remember openings beyond about 3 moves, I struggle with combinations in the middle game and I drag out endgames to embarrassing lengths even when well up. My game relies heavily on a sort of instinctive positional sense which is often wrong. In fact, the only noticeable way I've improved since the age of 12 is that I'm much better at knowing when to resign.

Chess brilliance is intriguing because it is innate and manifests itself in the child prodigy, as with maths and music. Unfortunately, the cerebral space taken up by chess brilliance rarely leaves room for anything else, and in some cases great players are otherwise absolute pond life.

Not so Kasparov - he's a great player and a great man too. I don't know how much of my quid actually went to Garry, but I don't begrudge him any of it.

Whilst the texture and geometry of well-made chess-pieces upon a solid wooden board provide an exquisitely delicate tactile pleasure, chess is otherwise an exercise in sensory deprivation. There is, of course, the sophistication of the evolving strategy, and one can almost feel the plurality of possible game-worlds branching into the future from each configuration, but it's all very abstract, and not particularly sensual.

In contrast, where chess is monochromatic and mute, Connect 4 is a brilliant primary colour extravaganza, rythmically entwined with the reassuring 'chinking' sound of the chips slotting into place. And, oh! the rapturous crescendo of sound as those chips cascade beneath the frame at the end of each game.

Whilst the aspirations of chess are confined to the horizontal plane, Connect 4 is defined by its bold verticality, and consequent gravitationality. Connect 4, in short, bespeaks of a yearning for the stars.

My nephew is a chess champion (was nationally ranked throughout his teens and has had Grand Masters visit his college campus for those deals where the Master walks rapidly past fifty boards making moves and beats everyone). Happily, my nephew is more interested in girls, beer, and politics than chess -- he's his class president and very popular. I did beat him once -- when he was about 8 -- and that's the best game of chess I've ever played.

For me, the game is Scramble on Facebook. I'm so addicted that Scrabble with my (now sad-faced) husband barely holds my interest for the slow 50 minutes we give ourselves for games. Scramble is like crack: 3 minutes a round and you can think of nothing else while you're playing. A mental orgasm, in other words.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.